A cloud full of digital junk
I don’t know about you, but my digital cleaning habits are rubbish.
I have a backlog of photos clogging up my cloud accounts, my email archive stretches back decades, and don’t get me started on my documents.
In the physical world, we notice when stuff builds up and eventually we “have a clear out”. I love that refreshing feeling of leaving the local dump having immediately forgotten the stuff that brought you there.
But we don’t do this online. I wonder why not?
Maybe we are all drugged up on the idea of unlimited storage — each with our own long tails of digital clutter. Each of us cyber hoarders in a way that would be socially unacceptable offline.
I’m certainly one of them. I can’t imagine going through it all myself, I simply don’t get that amount of spare time. I might hire a digital housekeeper one of these days but it’s not causing any real pain, I’m not sure I’m willing to pay to solve a pain I can’t feel.
I once wrote in a blog post (I’m a Data Stream believer) that I’d choose one photo a month to summarise the month and discard the rest. It was a reasonable idea, but I’ve never created the habit so I’ve never done it.
So my photos remain submerged in an ocean of snaps, uncategorised, unfiltered — thousands of photos, many identical aside from a frown here or a grin there. Ones and zeroes on a server somewhere near the arctic.
It’s not even an ocean I can easily dip into, the speed of browsing so many of them, it’s more like an icy wasteland! Amazon call their long term storage servers “glacier”. It’s an apt name — my digital junk is a very slow moving glacier.
Where are the books on digital minimalism? Where are the gurus of online feng shui?
Is there wheat hidden among the chaff? Is there freedom to be had in a trip to the digital dump? I’m not sure anyone really knows the answer.
Till then I’ll just keep paying for more and more cloud storage, for digital junk I’m probably never going to use. How modern.
